Label: Folklore Tapes

このシリーズ、全種本気で激推しです!!英国のディープな民俗学を探究、長年に渡り広く収集されてきた歴史のイメージをアブストラクトな音楽と実験的ビジュアルで作品化する、まさにインディペンデントな活動を行っているFolklore Tapes。このレーベルがシリーズで出版をしている、イングランド南西部の地域"デボン"の民俗学にフォーカスした"Devon Folklore Tapes"の#5。もともとは限定30本でリリースした激レアカセット音源を、新たに10インチ2枚組として作り直した新装版。副題"Ornithology"の通り鳥類学にフォーカスした作品であり、音楽家Dean McPhee & Mary Archesによる野鳥の声を軸としたナイトメア・コンクレート/アンビエントが聞けます。ゲートフォールド・ジャケットに12ページの研究ブックレットが縫い付けられる形で付属。





Folklore Tapes Archival Reissue Series:

Dean McPhee / Mary Arches
Devon Folklore Tapes Vol.V
Ornithology
Twin Ten-Inch Gatefold Edition
Contains 2x 10" Records & 12page Research Booklet & Download Code
Housed in manilla hand stamped & numbered paper sleeve (bag no longer available)
Ltd Edition: 500

(Please note that this reissue does not feature the original Children of Alice 'Harbinger of Spring' piece, as the group intend to release this as an extended release in the future. For this edition Dean Mcphee has produced a new set of recordings and research based on the Devonshire lore and legends of the nightingale, robin and blackbird)

Heed the magpie’s disquieting call. It’s a death knell lurking in birdskull. Perfidious bird; an emissary of ill omen in avian and human lore alike. If, as has been reckoned, magpies possess the capacity for self-scrutiny, might they possess yet greater powers? Enact rites our occluded minds fail to comprehend? Let’s enter, then, the minds of mags, crows, ‘daws, so their deaths, lives and secrets may rattle the louder inside our own.

The cackle of the jackdaw, betraying runes of rut so unseemly a libertine would blush. With no moral code to transgress, the ‘daw’s perversity knows no bounds. Would you like to know more? This is neither the time nor the place. Oh, just this tidbit then: there’s a single erogenous feather about the male ‘daw’s nether quarters. Locating this feather, the female plucks and the male, sprouting female organs, seeds itself purely for pleasure.

By the by. A green-eyed lady, proprietor of a shop brimming over with woolen things, kept a ‘daw about her person. By day it would perch upon her shoulder, whispering its filthy secrets. Her jumpers a mess of dandruff and dejecta, she’d give it its freedom at night, only for it to return ever-faithful in the morning. The green-eyed lady wondered sometimes as to the ‘daw’s twilit whereabouts. She need have feared. Taking woolens from her shop, the jackdaw had secreted these near the scenes of murders far and wide across the land. One day, there was a knock at the green-eyed lady’s door...

Crows, shape-shifters all. From egghatch they lay claim to a preternatural grasp of language. Not only of its own kind, nor solely its avian fellows, but of every species it spies. In turn, this gift allows the crow, through incantation, to transmute at will. It thus passes unnoticed among our kind. Look about you: this or that person might be harbouring crow’s wings, and you’ll never know.

To their birdly foes, the magpie is regarded as an unwitting seer, its every titter and gulp sifted for signs of bad tiding or glad. Indeed, in birdlore there exists a vast and complex tradition of rhyme devoted to interpreting the ways of the mag. Here we’ll try to expand on a few of these avian sayings and the mysterious acts to which they refer...